Religion and Reconciliation

My friend and colleague at Notre Dame, Dan Philpott, is involved in a new, worthy project:

“The idea of reconciliation has deep roots in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths,” says Philpott, associate professor of political science and peace studies, who is directing a new research program on religion and reconciliation at the Kroc Institute. “To be sure, religious people are not always reconcilers; in some settings they are supporters of violent division. Nor is reconciliation an exclusively religious concept. But reconciliation does have a strong affinity to religion, and many religious people are highly motivated to be peacebuilders.”  

The concept of reconciliation offers fertile ground for scholarly research and rich resources for peacebuilding, Philpott says. “A few scholars have done high-quality work on these topics, but many unanswered questions and controversies remain. For example, how does reconciliation differ from the ‘liberal peace,’ the prevailing concept at the United Nations and most western governments? Can religiously based reconciliation be effectively practiced in pluralistic societies? Does forgiveness disempower and disrespect victims, or does it empower victims to heal societies? What empirical evidence exists that religious peacebuilders have made a difference?” 

Philpott is currently working with Jennifer Llewellyn of Dalhousie University Law School in Nova Scotia, Canada, to develop the concepts of restorative justice and reconciliation as peacebuilding and to explore their meaning for forgiveness, amnesty, truth telling, and reparations. A team of scholars also has been commissioned to write papers on these concepts, and they will present them at a Kroc Institute workshop in fall 2010.